Comment by adsenseclient | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adsenseclient | Hacker News Reader

Posting from a throwaway handle, so that there is no way that Google would track me down.

Our company uses AdSense, and we have not been disabled so far. Our monthly revenues are much larger than Hatchling's. We have user-generated content. Despite our MOST extensive, multi-tier keyword-based content screening system, we are terrorized by Google weekly, from noreply address, that AdSense ads are disabled on this or that user's page, due to various violations found (often in the content in obscure languages, e.g. Hungarian , Finnish, Turkish), threatening to shut down the whole account. We are aware that the account can be shut down at any moment, and have been diversifying our ad revenue component for the last couple of years, using CasaleMedia, TribalFusion, Adbrite, taking conscious cuts in ad revenue compared to AdSense in exchange for security. Those companies actually care about your revenue.

DO NOT RELY on ADSENSE as a sole revenue provider for your startup! Do not! AdSense is only a good idea either if your revenue is negligible, or if you are a highly public high profile client like MySpace, where they KNOW that they cannot get away without serious negative PR.

On my opinion, this is why Google Payments never took off: they used the same smart-ass approach to shut down merchant accounts, knowing when a merchant was about to commit payment fraud before it was actually committed. In the case of sale of physical goods, an account termination could be much more harmful, so people stuck with PayPal, no matter how imperfect it was.

I don't understand. If you're smart enough to shut down an account before it does anything fraudulent, then you have no conceivable excuse not to pay the balance out when you close the account.

Thanks for bringing up some Adsense alternatives.

"DO NOT RELY on ADSENSE as a sole revenue provider for your startup! Do not! "

This is really a classic business issue. There is always a tradeoff between putting all your eggs in one basket (say what zynga did with facebook initially) and having a diverse customer base. Same goes for relying on a single vendor or source.

Obviously if you can diversify it makes sense. But it all depends on the revenue hit your take by doing so. Extra money that you earn can be banked toward the future as well.

Right, but the wise thing to do is to set up the other ad networks before Google shuts you down. Then you can just re-allocate percentages. Setting them up, optimising, etc requires time, so the best is to have the mix ready in advance.

Also try ValueClickMedia, in the past they paid a lot better for me than the alternatives you mentioned. Get someone on the phone though, don't try their automated application process.

Do you happen to use an ad manager that distributes traffic among all of those ad networks? I currently use Google's DFP and I realize that's not exactly all that safe either.

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